


Crossing

by ohhtheperiphery



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-27
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2018-08-18 05:19:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8150437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohhtheperiphery/pseuds/ohhtheperiphery
Summary: The death of Freddie Lounds, as it stands, has unlocked something new in their therapy sessions: a line of unorthodox that Will hadn't been fully aware they were at risk to cross. But once the crossing has begun, completion it seems is inevitable. Like an avalanche, like a flood, like a law of nature. Acts of God, spiraling in and around themselves, in perfect Fibonacci sequence. Once God has made a choice, no number of men at prayer can undo what's been done and will be done, forever and ever, amen.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This one's for the wife. (i you)

The same principle that drags you on into old age drags an object within the event horizon ever closer to the singularity. Within the event horizon, space is no longer the entity in which you can move around in three dimensions with impunity. There is only one direction, inward.

\-- J. Craig Wheeler, _Cosmic Catastrophes: Exploding Stars, Black Holes, and Mapping the Universe_ , p. 200

*

"There are probably better ways to go about catching him," --that's what Jack had said, three years and a handful of months before. Before. Time is a steady beat; a heart kind of beat, a gravel-crunching beneath boots kind of beat. An insistence that leaves a bitter taste in Will's mouth.

His first thought is that Jack's presence is unwelcome, his second that it's _rude_.

Jack has some agenda that isn't as callous as the one he presents, Will is almost sure of it around the bite of whiskey on his tongue. Snow falls soundlessly across the lake. There's a resolution in Will's abstinence, a pact he's made with himself, with the cold, with the emptiness that comes from being blissfully blank.

Jack threatens that, in the same way he always has -- with a pained look on his face that says this is what he has to do. That sees Will as a cog in the machine, playing a role that someone has to play, never mind how mangled he'll get in the process.

 _There are probably better ways_ , Will thinks, lets it sit defensive on his tongue, rolls it around his mind. He holds two weights, one in each palm, measures the tug and the pull, hangs in the balance between them.

He's been thinking a lot of water, lately. It seeps over from his conscious mind into his unconscious one, same as it always has. Dreams of drowning, ones that Molly wakes him from, holds his head as he gasps for air in the dark. Drowning itself is simple; it's the struggle that makes it hard, that keeps you alive.

There is, of course, another choice.

 _You have to cut that part out_ \-- Jack said that, too, in that other life. The memory is a point on a timeline from before Will tied a knot, a tourniquet around a wound in his mind, let tissue turn to scar.

The night is still, almost unsettlingly so. In the distance, a lone wolf howls at the waning moon. Molly sleeps, Walter sleeps. Will drinks. His glass appropriates the same temperature as his skin; not warm, not cold, against the brisk winter air.

*

He's never going to not dream about her.

"I dream about worlds where I died, sometimes," she tells him, fingers curling around the sterling of a spoon. Her dream nests inside his own, or maybe it's the other way around. Creatures tucked inside their shells.

Will traces a finger down the side of his coffee mug, doesn't quite process the texture of it. Too caught up in her outline, backlit by the curtains pulled, casting the kitchen in dirty blues, smoked-out white glares. 

"And how do those dreams end?"

Abigail smiles, like it's a joke and she's heard this one before. The blue of her eyes is shadowed dark, reflecting the room around them. "With me waking up."

Will tucks his echoing smile in a sip of coffee.

"Do you remember what you said?" he finds himself asking. "That day, when I woke up in the hospital. About never doing the wrong thing."

"If everything that can happen happens, you mean."

"Yes."

"I remember." She smoothes down a crease at the tablecloth. "Why?"

"I think about it a lot, I guess. Wonder if no matter what we do, we'll always end up in the same place."

"Like we're orbiting a black hole. Not even light can get out. Is it that kind of story?"

Will stares into his half-empty cup, frowns. "Doesn't matter which way you go. Doesn't do any good to struggle, or surrender."

"Gravity doesn't care." Abigail laughs, a sudden, sharp sound, like chimes blowing in the midwinter wind, like a shard of glass in his eye. "Maybe it would have been better if you hadn't gone after him."

"Maybe it doesn't matter," Will counters. "The event horizon stays the same."

*

Hannibal Lecter is infuriating on several levels, the least of which is his need to talk affected circles around any given topic of particular interest. At first, Will had supposed that what he told Jack had been the truth -- that Hannibal spoke only in euphemisms and vagaries to avoid the accident of a confession. Now he's beginning to wonder if Hannibal doesn't just enjoy talking this way for the sheer fun of it.

Tonight is no different. With a smile still playing at his lips, Hannibal dances around the subject like a giddy teenager who can't just goddamn say _we're eating people_.

It isn't an act of God that drives Will -- with the table cleared and the dishes only half dried -- so much as it is an impulse; dark, split-nerved, racked and careless. Maybe for Hannibal that would be classified as the same thing, impulses and miracles all swept into one category.

For Will it's less holy and more chemical. Some creak in the house sets him off, probably. Some heat sparked in his veins at the sight of Hannibal's knuckles white against the silver of a knife.

He can't stop imagining it: wrenching the knife from those hands, shoving it hilt-deep into Hannibal's heart, feeling the warmth of blood seep over skin, exquisite and intimate.

Will feels as if there's some magnetic pull yanking on the parts of him that rummage around in his ribcage, his gut. A Pandora's box of impulses and fragmented whims opened on the day Jack Crawford walked into his classroom that he hasn't been fully able to cram back into their container ever since, no thanks to Dr. Lecter's particular methods of _care_.

It's Will anyway who moves, who initiates (the way a puppet initiates, with certainty, with autonomy like a punch line). Will who brings their mouths together, who tastes Randall Tier transubstantiated to Freddie Lounds, transubstantiated to something else entirely at the edges of Hannibal's lips.

The knife clatters forgotten against a countertop, takes Will's imagination with it. He can see it so clearly in his mind's eye, it stabs through his temples: Hannibal dragging the knife out from his own chest, slamming it into Will's. There's reciprocity in the fantasy -- symmetry, an understanding that opens beneath them and threatens to swallow them whole.

Hannibal's teeth graze against Will's lips before he breaks the kiss. Something inside Will is snapped -- the closing of a clasp, or the unclosing; the inevitability of something that eases out of and into him as if he's been waiting for it his whole life.

Or maybe he's just entirely fucked.

Hannibal smiles that same ridiculous smile, the one previously reserved for not eating pork. "You're full of surprises tonight," he says in a way that suggests he isn't surprised at all.

*

Will falls in love with Molly's hands first, her eyes second. She always smiles at him like he's said something incredibly funny and a little embarrassing; he falls in love with her mouth third.

He hates himself for it, for the way he segments her into fractions, into parts that constitute the whole. It feels reductionist. It feels stilted.

"You've got that look again," she tells him, runs a finger down his chest.

"What look?"

"The one where you're thinking too much for having just had mind-blowing spectacular sex." She laughs, and it reaches up, catches in her eyes, ghosts at the corner of her mouth like an afterimage.

He laughs, too, because she laughs, and says sorry because he is.

Molly Foster loves baseball, loves her kid and reluctantly puts up with other ones. Prefers baking to cooking and science fiction to philosophy. When she laughs it reverberates through her entire body and spills into Will's. There's something contagious in her that way.

"I hope you like dogs," she tells him on their first date, flipping through photos on her phone of a labradoodle with soft golden curls and a polka-dotted bandana tied around her neck. "I sort of can't date anyone who doesn't like dogs. We just have the one right now, but I think it's a little sad for her to be without a sibling."

They get married on a rainy day in May, in a small ceremony on the outskirts of Maine. Everything else in his life feels very far away, like they've taken each other into a soft grey shell, like this shard of white sky is the only part of the sky, like the world ends at the edge of the horizon.

And for a time, it does.

*

The official story is that they died somewhere off the eastern coast. Of course, there are no bodies, because bodies make Jack Crawford's life simple. Bodies let Jack Crawford sleep at night.

There _is_ the body of Francis Dolarhyde, torn and mutilated and bled out. DNA on the corpse matches both that of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham.

"What are the chances that they actually are dead?" Margot asks, eyebrows knotted and eyes dark.

"Even if they were dead there would never be bodies," Jack says, in lieu of an actual answer. "They'd probably just swim directly into the gates of hell."

Alana lets out a huff of breath, dignified disapproval.

"Don't mythologize them, Jack," she says. "You know better than to allow them that."

Jack shakes his head. "Hard not to. They mythologize themselves."

"They're pretentious shits, that much is true."

"Maybe Will killed him?" Margot suggests. "Or he killed Will?"

"I'd prefer the first option," Alana states dryly, like she's ordering off a menu. "But I doubt it."

Jack grudgingly has to agree.

*

Will is used to being wounded, that's par for the course. He's almost even used to the way Hannibal looks at him. It had been something else at the Uffizi. Something... softer. Unnerving, like an animal denying everything within itself not to strike.

Will has never known Hannibal to deny himself, at least not for long. And somewhere between the time his shoulder erupted in pain and the time he reopened his eyes here, it's as if the shackles have fallen off in a place behind Hannibal's irises.

"This will hurt," is all the warning Will has before he's toppling forward. The world tilts, swims in his vision. His shoulder throbs, a sharp ache that binds him to the moment, that binds each moment to the next. Everything else is blocked out by Hannibal, except for the pain. His fingertips brush near where the bullet is still lodged in Will's skin, and Will moans, lurches. But that only lets Hannibal in deeper -- above him, around him, through him.

Hannibal pulls back just far enough to look him in the eye, close enough that Will can feel the whisper of his words fall soft like static across his skin. "You dropped your forgiveness," he murmurs. Slips the cool hilt of a knife across Will's palm, the cool pinch of a needle into his arm.

The world hangs on a string before it swirls, morphs into the idea of shapes, the idea of sounds. Will tries to hold onto things -- concrete, tangible surfaces, sure images -- but it all falls past his fingertips, shimmering raindrops cracked against the pavement.

Memories drift in through the dark spaces in his consciousness, blur together sensation and space and time. Hannibal's hands at his face, his neck. Will's hands tightened behind his back, bound. There's the pins and needles, pooling around the lack of blood in his wrists, sifting up his forearms. And there's the rush of blood under skin, where Hannibal's fingers trail -- lazy circles across Will's abdomen, the barely perceptible scrape of nails along the way. Lower, where he wraps his hand around Will and meets each thrust of Will's hips against his palm.

Hannibal leans down, kisses him. Will's mouth opens beneath his, an invitation that Hannibal ignores. Instead, the kiss is far too gentle and far too short. Will follows -- or tries, pulls at the restraints pinning his hands behind his back -- when Hannibal pulls away. But he doesn't have the leverage here.

Hannibal stills his hand, doesn't take it away from his grip at the base of Will's erection. Will fights back a groan. Hannibal's voice slices through the near-silence like a paper cut.

"What do you want, Will?"

There's no good answer to that question, Will knows, much less a true one. Hannibal's eyes are on him, an aching presence of sight that Will wishes he would take away, same as he has Will's hands, Will's ability to touch back when touched.

His reply gets swallowed up in the sound of a clock, somewhere in the room. _Tick-tock-tick_ , counting down harsh and heavy and uncomfortable seconds, lost in the air around them, between them. The secondhand separates each moment from the next, drags Will along with it.

Hannibal's laugh is small, considered. "What I want, then," he murmurs.

"--to have shown you Florence, Will." Hannibal's hand is at his chin, sliding down his neck. Every touch is a ricochet through Will's body, an after-thought of feeling, as if somewhere on the outskirts of his skin there's a dull thudding shell of a heartbeat that holds all of his pain just off to the side. He remembers what it was like to feel that pain, full-force. To be able to think and have his limbs answer him. But the memory feels distant, over-filtered.

The walls don't want to be stay in place. They swallow in around them with a dark familiarity that settles somewhere next to _almost comfortable_ in Will's stomach. Florence falls away and Baltimore rushes back in with a sickening ease.

"And you?" Will finds himself asking, fingers pulling at the clasp of Hannibal's belt.

Hannibal has the decency to look perplexed. "Me?"

"How would _you_ do it?" Will doesn't break his gaze. "How would you kill me?" His blood races with the thought -- a knife pulled from a chest and dug deeper into another chest. The grip of fingers around a throat like an echo.

Hannibal moves a hand through Will's hair, down the side of his face. Stroking, gentle, the way one touches a pet. One part of Will wants to grab him by the wrist and shove him away. The other is fighting the urge to close his eyes. Between the two, he stands motionless. Does nothing, which is also a choice.

"Forget apologies and forgiveness." Hannibal is hard against Will's palm. "Forget who wants what." Will punctuates his words with the movement of his hands, doesn't break eye contact.

"Just tell me how you would do it."

For a moment, the only look on Hannibal's face is that infuriating, familiar one of amusement just on the edge of boredom. But then it slips somewhere else, a fish darting beneath the surface and leaving nothing but ripples in its wake.

"The outside world has a profound effect on you," Hannibal says, his voice steady, focused. "On anyone, of course, but on you in particular. You take so much of the world around you inside yourself." He runs the pad of a thumb across Will's lower lip, trails after it with his eyes.

"I would open you, I think." His voice is very soft as he leans in closer. Somewhere since he started talking Will's hands have stopped moving along him, but Hannibal doesn't seem concerned.

"Open me?" Will repeats, doubtfully.

"Yes," Hannibal says, smiles tightly. "Where, exactly, is unfortunately a matter _entirely_ of apologies and forgiveness. There are many places to cut into a person, let some of what's in out. Choosing is a matter of how interested one is in having his subject suffer."

"Would you have me suffer?" Will registers what his face must look like more from Hannibal's expression (back to that same dulled amusement) than from any sense of himself.

"Not tonight."

There's a monster in his gut and it's chewing its way out from the inside. The rain on his feet is warm and sticky and not rain at all. He can't keep standing, not when Hannibal lets go. The ground holds him up instead. Hannibal is somewhere above. He steps into a different world, a world that doesn't belong to Will, or that Will doesn't belong to.

And if Will were to follow? If Will were to go where he knew he wasn't invited? What would Hannibal do with him then?

"--what we've only tasted figuratively," Hannibal is saying. Jack is shouting. He opens his mouth and the sound of a bone saw comes out.

This moment is... private, Will thinks. But for some reason it only seems right that Jack is here.

How do you cut out a part of you that's grown so far inside it's wrapped up in every inch of your body? Like a cancer, webbed into the fissures of his brain. It's not operable. Or at least not survivable.

When the first strand of blood rolls down his cheek, it doesn't even hurt. So, forgiveness after all.

*

"You can absolutely choose to be abused, you know," Alana tells him, although he hasn't asked. "It doesn't invalidate what happens to you. It might actually be beneficial, to recognize the ways in which you retain your own agency in the face of aggressive tactics. It doesn't make you at fault to acknowledge that you have _choices_ , Will."

Will doesn't look at her. Stares straight ahead, body held stiff.

"You looked so content when I first saw you," she continues despite his silence. "You looked healthy. But this month... It's been a weight on you. I see that. Jack sees that. And Hannibal..." She stops, sighs into the room. "Hannibal will use that to his advantage. Will _continue_ to use that to his advantage."

"I pulled her into this." Will's voice cuts through her words, sudden and harsh. "I pulled Molly and Walter into... all this. Same way Jack pulled me in."

"You're both doing the best you can," Alana says. It comes out defensive. "We all are."

"No," Will spits out. He sounds shaken, though he remains solid, eyes locked to the corner of the room. "We're all doing the best _Hannibal_ can. We're all in his orbit, and he's just watching us fall."

"What Hannibal does is separate from what you do." Alana says it slowly, as if maybe this time he might listen, might believe her. "You're not inextricably intertwined, Will. Giving up your power like that, it's... It's dangerous. You're slipping the same way you always slip with him."

She can't say she's particularly surprised when Will doesn't reply.

*

The death of Freddie Lounds, as it stands, has unlocked something new in their therapy sessions: a line of unorthodox that Will hadn't been fully aware they were at risk to cross. But once the crossing has begun, completion it seems is inevitable. Like an avalanche, like a flood, like a law of nature. Acts of God, spiraling in and around themselves, in perfect Fibonacci sequence. Once God has made a choice, no number of men at prayer can undo what's been done and will be done, forever and ever, amen.

And Hannibal on his knees has never been an act of supplication. Somehow, he turns even this into condescension, into dominance. Or, Will thinks -- before Hannibal's mouth closes around him and he isn't thinking about much of anything anymore -- maybe that observation says more about himself than it does about Hannibal.

Hannibal is better at this than Will. The thought isn't surprising, and if anything it just makes Will harder. Hannibal takes him in with slow movements of his tongue, drawing further down the length of him. His hands tighten around Will in counterpoint to where his mouth doesn't.

Everything he does is careful, exact, planned. _This is my body, this is my blood._ A service, orchestrated and rehearsed to perfection.

There's nothing in Will that wants to allow Hannibal that satisfaction.

"Fuck," Will bites out before giving in, before grabbing fistfuls of Hannibal's hair and thrusting himself further into his mouth. He doesn't seem prepared for that, at least, chokes out a startled groan around Will's cock. But he recovers well, relocates his hands to Will's thighs and lets Will move him. Lets Will fuck his mouth.

Which is what Will does, and there's nothing _careful_ about it. Hannibal yields with an ease that's as maddening as anything, follows the motion of Will's thrusts, shallow but insistent. Doesn't resist Will's grip on him, holding him in place. As if he would go anywhere else.

Will comes without warning, with a breathless gasp wrung out of him like it pains him, with fingernails digging in at Hannibal's scalp, at the base of his skull.

Hannibal continues moving his tongue along the length of Will after, like Will is a teenager and Hannibal might keep going like this until he's hard again. The thought is intriguing, sends a fresh wave of heat down Will's spine.

Will pulls him off instead. Beneath him, Hannibal looks like a strange simulacrum of himself: hair disheveled, lips parted and wet, the rise and fall of his chest quickened. His eyes are dark, staring up, clouded with lust and other things that Will doesn't begin to name.

"Get up," Will rasps out. Hatred and desire coalesce, leave him with a dizzying sickness swimming, buzzing through his veins.

Hannibal stands. The distance between them is negligible, meaningless. Annoying.

Will closes it with a violence that he can't seem to shove back to wherever it came from inside him, and Hannibal continues to seem entirely uninterested in resisting. The smirk on his face makes Will feel like smacking it off him, so he kisses him instead. It's an open-mouthed punch of a kiss, and he tastes himself in it, thick and languid on Hannibal's swollen tongue.

Will jerks him off in steady, unsophisticated strokes. Hannibal's fingers clutch at him, a bruising grasp at the edge of his hips, but he rarely closes his eyes throughout, keeps them fixed on Will. Will can feel them move over him -- trailing along the slant of his jaw, down along his jugular, locked on a collarbone.

Whatever sound he makes when he comes is lost in Will's mouth, pressed in against his tongue.

Hannibal arranges himself afterward as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. Makes some small, obnoxious face at the state of his clothes, shuffles through some papers at his desk.

"It's dangerous, you know," he announces, after a time. "For me."

Will frowns. "You're going to have to be more specific," he lies.

"You," Hannibal says. "This. I have little suspicion that I need explain to you the ways our relationship defies customary doctor-patient protocols."

"Thought that would be among the societal norms that were beyond you at this point," Will posits, maybe mocks.

"On the contrary, while I may advise skirting traditional social customs as the occasion requires it, it's best that one knows all the rules before they agree upon breaking them."

Will scoffs at that. "If you took any sort of -- I don't know -- vows of the psychiatric profession, I'm pretty sure you've broken just about every one at this point," he says, and not kindly. "You can't honestly be worried about me."

"The societal rules placed on any relationship that centers around an inherent imbalance in power are important not only to protect the partner in the more traditionally powerless position," is Hannibal's response.

"So you're worried about yourself."

"As I said, this is dangerous for me." Hannibal's voice is calm, controlled. He sounds nearly bored. "Although I don't disagree that it's dangerous for us both. I merely meant to suggest that you," and here he stops to smile, the glint of his teeth unsettling in the dim light of the fireplace, "are a risk for me. Trusting you -- in many capacities -- is neither safe nor entirely smart."

Will stares, not sure how to process this beyond the obvious threat that it is. Doctor-patient boundaries be damned, he knows that Hannibal means nothing more than to -- assert himself as what? The apex predator, no matter how their relationship evolves? Fully in control of the situation? _Don't seduce me on Jack Crawford's behalf, or at least don't think that I don't see that as a possibility of what you might be doing?_

Will's mind flits between several replies -- chief among them _Go fuck yourself_ \-- before settling on, "I'm not stupid enough to trust you at all."

Hannibal's smile widens at that, although Will can no longer see his teeth.

"Though you no longer feel it necessary to threaten me with a gun to the head."

"No," Will agrees, or defers. And then clarifies despite any better notions, "But there are other things I would do to you."

"Then," Hannibal says, sounding pleased, "I believe we are on the same page."

*

The heart of Will's desire regarding the status of Freddie Lounds remains, at best, Schroedinger-esque. When he sets her aside in a box, she remains quite simultaneously alive and dead not only for the purposes of Jack, and the FBI, and Alana's renewed faith in him if not in humanity at large, but also for Will. Out of sight, out of mind; Freddie Lounds is a choice that isn't his, but rests in some other hands.

In Jack's hands, Freddie is an indisputable Ace, the closest to a play at checkmate with the Chesapeake Ripper that he's ever had.

In Hannibal's, she is an offering -- sacramental, sacred. A blood covenant shared on their tongues and in their bodies.

It doesn't consistently matter to Will that at the center of Hannibal's grasp of the situation there remains primarily smoke and mirrors. So long as Hannibal knows the truth within the box to be that _Freddie Lounds is dead_ , then everything within the sphere of that universe, of that truth, remains a truth also for Will.

Freddie is alive when there's a certain stance in Jack's shoulders, a sadness in his eyes. This is a man whose morals hold him upright, keep him tightly rooted to the earth and all the things in it, even those things that are enough to make Will crack, spill over. Jack discusses their plans in terms that are sure and clear, that spin Will's resolve when it falters, that make everything inside him want to want what his instincts don't instinctually allow. Drowning is simple; Jack is the burning ache in his lungs for air.

Freddie is dead when Hannibal fucks him. Will knows he shouldn't be persuaded this easily, feels his own malleability burn up the back of his throat like nausea. But then the entire world is condensed down to the teeth on his neck and the skin at the small of Hannibal's back under his nails, and it isn't so much the act itself as it is the idea of it that draws him in, holds him there. Takes the decision out from his hands, takes the breath out from his lungs, takes the soul out from the puppet. Annihilation is a relief, amongst other things.

Freddie is alive when Hannibal whispers Abigail's name, when he has the gall to say he wishes he could do or undo _anything_ in relation to her. Revenge has a heavy, bloated stomach, an animal sickness that's raw and sour; it settles its sheathed claws in Will's nature, ready and waiting to strike. When Hannibal talks about her, he stirs that place in Will that's interested in more than doing bad things to bad people. He kindles instead an instinct that's worse than self-destruction: a suicide bomber's disregard for anything and anyone in his path.

Freddie is dead when Hannibal's voice filters to him through radio waves and miles, through night and rain. When all other things between them fall aside, when justice and forgiveness pale besides the simple choice of being _with_ or _without_. Morality worn away to absolution. Will would kill her with his own hands if he had to, in that moment.

That moment, of course, is too late.

*

"That's the thing about addicts, though," Beverly is saying, tapping a pen against a clipboard, staring at the body on the table between them, "they're never really cured."

"Always a recovering substance abuser, never recovered," Jimmy quips, agrees.

Will isn't entirely listening. Takes another swig of his coffee, wonders when the last time he took an aspirin was. The edges of a migraine are creeping in on his vision, silver splashes of white noise in the periphery of the room.

"Is that really sanitary?"

It takes him a heartbeat too long to realize Zeller is talking to him. He runs a hand across his forehead, glances in Zeller's direction. It comes off more like a grimace.

"What?"

"The coffee." Zeller gestures at Will's hands. "I mean, with the body and all."

"Pretty sure this--" Will indicates the corpse between them, or more precisely the thing that killed the corpse, "--isn't airborne."

Zeller stares at him. "This really _appetizing_?" he amends.

"Don't need much of an appetite for coffee," Will grunts back. "Just need to stay awake."

Thoughts about the line between addiction and appetite rattle around in his head, later. Past blocks of buildings, down the busy inner-city Baltimore streets. In the winter evening the natural light from outside has already dwindled down to a dull orange roar deep in the western sky, mostly eaten up in the city skyline.

"The will to eat is strongly linked to the will to survive," Dr. Lecter says. "One could say that the will to eat _is_ the will to live."

"Haven't felt much like eating, lately," Will says.

"But you do," Dr. Lecter prompts.

"Eat?"

A nod. Another prompt.

"Obviously."

"Because hunger is more than appetite, than pure desire. It's a physiological longing."

"For something needed to survive." Will lets his gaze wander up for a moment, flicks it away just as fast. "Addicted to being alive?"

Dr. Lecter lets out a short laugh. "Perhaps."

Will runs a finger along the edge of his chair. "Better than the alternative," he muses, maybe questions. He forces his lips upward into something resembling a smile, or an echo of one.

"Something like that," Dr. Lecter agrees.

*

He can taste the blood in his mouth. Warm and wet and real. The night is huge and empty except for the sound of the ocean crashing against the cliffs and the cold echoing beam of a lighthouse in the distance. He feels like a child, holding a seashell to his ear for the first time.

He wanted a lot of things, once. Retribution. Justice. Understanding. To forgive. To be forgiven.

None of that makes sense, anymore. An emptiness wells up inside him, swells to overflowing.

Hannibal's mouth tastes of salt and iron, sickly sweet and dizzying. Will topples them over the cliff's edge with the same certainty he's always made any decisions regarding this man -- a certainty that rests in his bones as a taut bridge, suspended between the things he wants and the things he wishes he didn't.

Suspension is, after all, nothing without a collapse.

*

Will on his knees has never been an act of supplication. So they're neither of them praying; neither entreating. There's a calm in this, a cold thrill wrapping sure fingers around a heart.

He had been so sure, once. Will had held that world in his fingertips, had smashed it to pieces.

Hannibal touches Will's cheek, and Will winces at that. Tries to cover it -- instinct, protecting himself against perceived weakness -- but can't, not quite. The gash there is still covered in gauze, hasn't fully recovered, despite Chiyoh's best treatments. It won't heal, not completely. Will will wear a triumvirate of scars across himself, skin tattooed with a map leading from gut to mind to mouth.

On a literary sense, at least, linearity is overrated, Hannibal supposes.

Will rests his good cheek against Hannibal's thigh. The room is still besides the sound of his breathing. Steady, in Hannibal's ears.

Tranquil is not a word that Hannibal would use to describe Will Graham. But something has loosened in him, some rough edge smoothed down, like a stone eroded in water, the shore receding against the tide.

He runs a hand through Will's hair.

"Do you feel reborn?"

Will breathes in.

"Yes," he says, simply. He looks up, doesn't raise his head, just his eyes, and a warmth spreads through Hannibal. Pulsates through every wound, scratch, bruise, muscle, vein, joint.

"You were hoping to kill us both," Hannibal continues, paying careful attention to the movement of his fingers against Will's scalp, to the soft hitches in breath they draw out from him. "And you succeeded."

"Yes," Will answers a second time. His hand is an echo of Hannibal's own, flexing against Hannibal's thigh.

Hannibal traces over Will's mouth with his fingers, follows the curve of Will's lips up to where the gauze sits across his skin. He touches it less gently this time, presses in enough to elicit a gasp. Will's knuckles tighten on his leg before he reaches up -- before he grabs Hannibal's hand, locks it against his cheek, presses it further against the wound.

"Yes," he says a third time, eyes closed and neck pulled back against Hannibal's hold at his face, against his own hand layered above Hannibal's, against their fingers intertwined, pulling. He says it to the air, to nothing. An affirmation, marrow deep, blood seeped and shuddering, falls from his lips like liturgy.

*

Maybe no one ever left that house. Maybe they stayed on, ghosts wandering through halls, long lost to echoes and memories and distant voices whispered down staircases, tucked up like cobwebs in the corner. It would be safer, in the dark places, the crevices and cracks, where light filters in like the sun through layers of the ocean.

Or maybe not.

Maybe there's a boat like a small house waiting offshore. Creatures cradled in their own mythologies, pulling stones from their second skins and seaweed from each other's hair. A lighthouse signaling sailors and worse home in the night. A meteor shower crashing at the edge of the horizon, falling stars lost to the depths of the sea.

It is arguably a beautiful, horrible thing, the destruction of worlds. Envelopment into nothingness. Although, to recognize the beauty -- and the horror -- one must first recognize the moment for what it is. Crossing an event horizon is perhaps something of a let-down, amidst such intense hype. Maybe somewhere a bridge crumbles; maybe somewhere a truth is known. Either way, there's no going back.


End file.
